Yes, indeed, the mysterious or magical or Clarkeian-science transformation of human into penguin (as compared with the more benign always-a-penguin fic) has an astonishingly and gratifyingly wide existence.

This is the backyard beez, not the horsefarm hives. These I had wrapped, wincingly, in asphalt-impregnated felt, and I had piled dry leaves in the empty top box on top of the queen excluder in DIY imitation of the quilt box of a Warré hive. And I hoped for the best. Oh, and I had put a mouse-excluder in the entrance, and poked a couple of holes in the hive.

I had only seen one bee outside all this time, and was concerned for them. But you don't open a hive in winter.

So today, it is sunny, still, and in the high 20s. And all the girls are outside! They're surviving!

I don't know if I mentioned that I had paid for a fourth and last set of bees; the man who was to get them to me had forgotten that I needed them in one of two specific containers, and also forgot that I had already paid for them.

Yesterday, finally, he delivered them, after nearly a month.

It is a wild-caught swarm, meaning that they swarmed from an established hive, and their young queen had decided that the hollow foundation of a flag pole was a lovely place to establish them. This summer being what it has been, I can only find her reasoning correct.

At any rate, this was the year that the owners of the flagpole had chosen to replace it. Imagine their surprise!

So what the Beeman decided to do was to cut out the comb that had been built in the hollow and to rubber-band it into Langstroth frames to encourage the gals to come up into the box he put the frames into. That box he put over top of the hole-hive.

All well and good for the ladies, who followed their nursery upstairs and began working on it. But the Queen, whom I am naming Dido, disliked having her decisions set aside, and kept returning underground after she would lay in the existing and new comb. Meaning the Beeman could not bring the hive to me: useless without Dido.

But she finally decided to move. So yesterday the Beeman brought me ...

Three (3) supers worth of bees in drawn-out frames.

Rather than one (1) box or three (3) frames of bees.

What I am saying here? Is that Carthage has basically been built in a day.

I have them outside the barn in the corner of it; they get sun from 2 hours after daybreak to two hours after noon, and shade the remainder of the day. Since the lid to the hive is covered in a thin metal sheet, I have chosen to layer it with some branches to slow the boiling process a tad little bit. those branches have wilted; I shall have to do more work on this.

But I can sit here at the table and watch them through the back door. Vanderfull!

So I muddled down to the hives yesterday, and found myself waist-deep in Queen Anne's Lace.

So much for the drought depriving my poor gals of their proper diet.

And with the pond beside them, they had not died of thirst either. I had offset their lids from their boxes, and in some cases the boxes themselves, to let the air through, and this seemed to have helped.

Victoria's hive is still A#1, with hundreds of ladies in the doorway and others going in and out in the gaps. While they hadn't actually started drawing out wax on the upper foundation I had left for them, they were crawling all over it - I could see their little apiarchtectural minds plotting, I really could. Meanwhile, they had used propolis to seal together each and every segment of their hive. I was, like, whoa, okay, I ain't gonna look at the lower box, no problem!

Elizabeth II's hive is also flourishing in its own way. (I'm going to call her Libby2 from now on.) I think those kids will be ready for a queen excluder and an upper box of their own next week. The gals have built up in nearly every single frame that I had left them with.

Of course, I couldn't check the lower box. They, too, had been busy with the propolis. I went to lift the top one off, and both boxes came up.

Finally, Anne's family is thriving at last! The adoptees and the stepmother are doing a great job, and there are bees all over the place! I need to prepare them a second lower for the next time I go out, but I can take a deep breath: they will not go extinct.

Referring, of course, to the old - and quite true - adage about appropriate responses to attack, Nietzsche: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster . . . for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

But "becoming the monster," horrible as it is, by becoming as xenophobic and misogynistic and mistrustful of facts that disagree with our beliefs, is not, actually, the worst part. Just like the swellings of the Black Plague were not its worst part.

No: the worst part is that, by reacting with the same excesses our enemies use, we agree that they were correct to act as they did, and we acknowledge that we have no call to complain about it.

I base this claim on a few premises single premise:

Everybody, without exception, is "me" to hirself.

The correlation, then, is the rule:

A rule has to be the same for me as for anyone else.

Because, of course, otherwise we have a whatsit, a sociopath, who doesn't realize that everyone else is also a person, and instead thinks that everyone not hir is actually a puppet. People like that have to be removed from the rest of us before they do damage. Or more damage. Anyway.

SO: if the ends justify the means, if it is appropriate for anyone to torture someone else to try to get information in order to protect the people sie loves, then Al Qaeda is correct to torture people to defend its own. The Taliban is correct to torture people to scare them into not endangering its own people.

If the ends justify the means, and a group of people feels that because another group has been attacking and injuring and killing it, disrespectfully and thoughtlessly, it is appropriate to respond lethally in such a way as to wake up the others to their misdeeds - then Al Qaeda was correct to fly the planes into the Towers so long as we were correct to invade Afghanistan. Suicide bombers are correct to kill anyone so long as they also kill treacherous police and military, if we are correct to kill anyone so long as we also kill sneaky terrorists.

If God has brought these wars down upon us in retribution for the worldliness of our women and the degeneracy of our permissiveness, then it was correct for Al Qaeda to attack us, as the very Hand of God.

We should rather be grateful.

So. I disagree that the end justifies the means. I disagree that it is in any wise appropriate to use the same tactics on our foes as they have or might use on us.

Because I disagree that they were correct. I call them wrong.

And they are only wrong ... if I call it wrong for me to do anything like it.

So I have been in training for 8 days; tomorrow they think will be my last day of training, and they want to have me on the phones in the afternoon. My entire 4-person class is doing very well, and I am at the top of my class.

Oh, I hope this goes well. It requires more of my skills than the CapTel job did, and doesn't require the kind of lingual agility that CapTel did, and that proved my undoing there.

So: bees. We have three hives: the weak hive, the normal hive, and the strong hive. The weak hive was dying off. I had been urged to place it in the same spot as the others (there is a pond there, which helps with the drought), and to swap in a couple of frames of bees from the strong hive. That hadn't gone quite as well as I had hoped, so I put it just entirely on top of the strong hive, and hoped for the best. By "not going as well," what I mean is "wasn't increasing in any visible fashion." By "hoping for the best" what I mean is "these gals are already building a bunch of places they aren't supposed to be building, so let's see if they will build in this hive."

They did it. The gals built all over several frames, and the queen laid up there, and the hive was up to thousands of workers when I looked at it yesterday. Too cool. And I had just collected their new queen, and inserted her, so I have a lot of hope for the weak hive's survival now.

So while I had those two hives open, I opened the third, and saw that they still hadn't grown very much. So I took a deep breath, and took out two of the entirely unused frames from there, and inserted one of the Downtown Construction Site frames from the top of the strong hive. This gives the ambitious ladies two more frames of their own to build on for their queen, and gives the transferred workers a lot of elbow room for their creativity.

I had also brought out one of the queen-excluders, and a half-full "super," which is a shorter box in which the workers only build honey cells - since the queen can't get there to lay brood. (It's a "super" because it goes on top of the "brood boxes," which is where the queen lays her eggs.) I'll need to put fresh foundation in another 7 or 9 frames to take out there and finish filling it. Frankly, I need to put fresh foundation into all the super frames I have, but it has been too hot and I haven't been in the mood. So that is a goal for this week.

Okay! Audience participation time!

I'd like to name these three queens; something that refers to the states that their hives are in somehow, so that I can remember who is who. SO.

Offer me names. With each name, tell me which hive it goes with, and why.

When I have enough to make a selection among, I will choose a couple for each, and put them up for more discussion.

So I went upstairs to check on the barn bees last week. it had been several days, and it had been cold and it had been warm, and I wanted to see how they were doing. I didn't hear any sound when I went upstairs, ( which was a trifle worrying. )

So I looked for an academic history of gay marriage to pull together all the stuff I'd been hearing, and found this intriguing paragraph:

It was in the thirteenth century, however, that the first laws against sodomy emerged and began to be enforced. Through the next several centuries in the West, all manner of behavior deemed deviant or unnatural began to be condemned, causing a shift from the earlier belief that same-sex unions were “problematic” because they were interpreted as unnatural to the belief that same-sex unions were a serious threat to society—and, like heretics, witches, and Jews, practitioners of such unions were violently repelled.

This is precisely when the Medieval Glaciation period began, plunging all of Europe into famine and plague up through the 1800s.

When prayer and repentance failed to fix the situation, folks tried to get rid of the people they figured God was punishing them for tolerating.

Look, folks: it's warm. We have plenty of food. We have plenty of people. We have plenty of old people.